Here There Be
by joudama
Summary: Because every castle, or mind palace, as the case may be, has a dungeon.


**A/N:** Sometimes when I'm bored at work, my fic brain makes nice, wholesome crack. Sometimes it makes something neither nice nor wholesome, because it clearly does not believe in us having _nice_ things.

This takes place during the Hounds of Baskerville.

./

Sherlock Holmes has a mind palace. It is where he stores his memories. It is an intricate palace, with many trapdoors and secret passages and even treasure rooms (memories of Mummy, onyx, have always gone into those, and grand-mere, silver, and most recently of a cab ride where a rumpled ex-army doctor told him he was extraordinary; the moment embedded in a simple little shining piece of amber the color of John's hair.)

There are some things he does not want to remember, but things he can not delete because they won't allow it, no matter how hard he tries to erase them from his mental hard drive.

For these, there is a dungeon.

It is hard to access. Dungeons are not nice places, and many of his memories, the things that would change the child he was into the man he became, are not nice things, either. In order to function, these memories, and the _distracting_ and irrational emotions that accompanied them, have been imprisoned in this dungeon.

Once he had finished trapping them there, he deleted the memory of the paths to the dungeon.

This was as much a mistake as trying to delete the memories themselves had been, because one day, in a fit of boredom, he stumbled upon the dungeon door. And then opened it.

The next few years were a blur of cocaine and bad decisions and mainly cocaine as the things that had been trapped in the dungeon ran rampant. There were also a few good decisions, one of which was to seal the dungeon again and to delete the labyrinthine paths to it once more...but _this_ time, he put up warnings along the way so he wouldn't open the door in his mind again. He lets himself remember the dungeon is there and that it houses terrible things (although he does not let himself remember _what_ terrible things they are, but since he is aware, there are ripples - a protective _disgust_ of certain matters; insomnia, which he was always prone to and he thinks this fine as he did not like sleeping anyway), which had been his fatal mistake before.

Remembering the dungeon even exists, though almost nothing of what it contains, is in itself a risk, but stumbling upon it and opening the way blind is even _more_ of one.

But the dungeon means that he is free; that he is not bound by the terrible and overwhelming emotions of the memories. And it means that the cocaine is now only a physical addiction, one he can ignore as much as any of his body's ridiculous needs, instead of the only way to keep what he had let loose from the dungeon at bay.

He hears them now as he sits with shaking hands, howling from the dungeon, threatening to break down the door that had always seemed so secure, and he beats back against the battering in his head with deductions and reasonings that are more desperate than anything he has ever felt, lashing out at everything, even John, _especially_ John and all his insisting in _feeling_, because he knows, he _knows_, that if he gives into the...the _fear_ making his hands shake, and the _doubt_, then the things imprisoned in the dungeon will escape and he will not be able to chain them again.

He does not remember what they are, in the dungeon, but he does remember the aftermath of when he accidentally set them loose, what he became utterly repugnant to him, both then (the cocaine helped with that as well) and more so now that the emotions of what caused it have been so carefully chained away and he can look at it cools and rationally. He will not be that pathetic, disgusting thing again, shaking from withdrawal and desperate.

But he is shaking now.

He hears them sometimes,_ scratching _at the walls and scritching in the shadows - they had become louder, after Irene Adler. But they had never been like this. He has never been _afraid_, not since, he knows, he locked those things in the dungeon. Until now, the only thing that had caused him to be afraid were whatever was in those memories.

His hands have shaken in fear before, but he does not remember it even if the things in the dungeon do and batter at the walls, emboldened; does not know how this awakens the things in his subconscious that had made it impossible for him to delete the memories wholesale, and he has no way to cope with this.

The alcohol is not enough; it's not. His hands shake and the things in the dungeon _howl_, and Sherlock knows that this is not _rational_, that this is not _him_, and he-

And he will go to the dungeon. And he will build another wall, to seal in the door. And when the morning comes, he will not hear _their_ howls - only the howls of the hound.

And the hound, he can - and _will_ - solve.

The rest of these things, the _unease_ of the scritching and the sound of the howls from the things in the dungeon, he can - and _will -_ imprison where they belong.


End file.
